Ask HN: Is HN Essentially a Subreddit? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is HN Essentially a Subreddit?

The core of them are both threaded style comments and user submissions to mostly external links. There are just minor tweaks to moderating and voting.

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I forget if PG started HN before or after YC funded Reddit. It's best to think of the two in an evolutionary sense, meaning, HN intentionally remained simple as opposed to Reddit. This was a prudent choice and many have complained about it, but I feel that otherwise HN would have ended up with the problems Reddit is facing now--specifically, where subs turn sour once they reach peak population in size. Ultimately, it's not a difference in features or lack therein that make Reddit and HN different, but the purpose they serve and the types of users they attract; PG made HN as a selection mechanism for YC candidates whereas Reddit is more of a social media platform and as such is focused on selling ads.

I just wrote up a novel. Here are the comments to a unrelated post ended up getting comments(s) from me answering ironically your post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=RemingtonLak

Its not quite like Reddit because the same forum can have posts about starting a cooking business and posts about theoretical nuclear physics.

If HN was a subreddit it would be bad news. Some topics here would get pushed to the front page of Reddit, which would be terrible.

At a sufficiently rough resolution, yes, they're very similar.

At a detailed resolution, no, they're very different.

It's the same genre of thing, yes.

basically yes. but it's a lot nicer, IMO, than Reddit's interface.

No, hn users are different

no, this one is not a cesspool

That very much depends. Although there are plenty of well curated and moderated subreddits with quality posts and technically knowledgeable posters equal to anything HN has to offer, Hacker News also tends to descend into juvenile piss-taking rancor and bigotry with subjects outside of its techie wheelhouse.

At this point I'm certain dang has his constant pleas to avoid gender/race/religious war, nationalistic slurs and "posting in the flamewar style" linked to hotkeys just to avoid carpal tunnel.

Yeah this site isn’t half of what I think it is.

Still, the quality of top level links tend to be pretty good and I tend to find stuff on here I otherwise wouldn’t have.

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